Dark energy

LAST year, Chris Smith saw 25 stars explode. He is a lucky man. In the three millennia before the 20th century, we recorded far fewer supernovae. Now these stellar cataclysms are being collected like new species of beetles: over the next decade, astronomers should spot thousands. But this catalogue of stellar disasters is only a means to an end. In a project called ESSENCE, based at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, Smith and his colleagues are hunting something far more important than explosions. They are on the trail of arguably the deepest mystery in physics: dark energy.

This cosmic puzzle was first encountered in 1998, when two groups of astronomers reported that dozens of distant supernovae appeared surprisingly faint (New Scientist, 11 April 1998, p 26). They concluded that the expansion of the Universe must be accelerating, dimming these distant explosions. It came as rather a shock, ...

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